People who use Internet Explorer are more likely to be rubbish at their jobs, according to a new survey.

According to a survey conducted by Cornerstone OnDemand, data collected and analysed from over 50,000 people indicates that people who used browsers such as Chrome and Firefox tend to stay at their jobs up to 15 per cent longer than the ones who preferred Internet Explorer or Safari.

Not only this, it was assessed that non-Internet Explorer users also performed their jobs better.

Cornerstone OnDemand flogs software which aids employers in recruiting as well as retaining employees.

The 50,000 people who were analysed in the test were first put through a 45-minute online test, as part of the software, after which they were selected. They were then used for customer-service and sales jobs.

Chief analytics officer at Cornerstone, Michael Housman the fact that people take time to install Firefox on your computer shows us something about you.

"It shows that you're someone who is an informed consumer. You've made an active choice to do something that wasn't default."

Although not a crystal clear method of ascertaining the worth of an employee, it is definitely a start, he said.

Microsoft has formally announced the death of Internet Exploder which will gradually be replaced by something which is now called Project Spartan.

According to internet statistics firm StatCounter, Google's Chrome Web browser has now past 20 percent of global market share, and for the first time Microsoft's Internet Explorer has slipped below 50 percent.

Google's browser, which was officially launched in late 2008, took 20.7 percent of the global market in June, which was up from 2.8 percent year over year from 2009. The uptick in usage of the Chrome Web browser has marked a sevenfold increase over the last two years as Google battles in desktop mobile and search markets with Microsoft and Apple.

According to its market share data report for the month of June 2010, Microsoft's Internet Explorer led with 53.7 percent, Firefox had 21.7 percent and Chrome 13.1 percent. Apple Inc's Safari 7.5 percent and Norway's Opera 1.7 percent.

StatCounter, which is based Ireland, states that it's statistics are based on data collected from a sample base of more than 15 billion page views per month from over than 3 million websites. Net Applications, a preferred browser statistics source, estimates that Google's share has not increased quite as much.

Google has decided that it will not support older browsers on its cloud. In a statement the outfit said that in order for web applications to spring even farther ahead of traditional software, its teams need to make use of new capabilities available in modern browsers.

Google wants to bring in desktop notifications for Gmail and drag-and-drop file upload in Google Docs require advanced browsers that support HTML5. Google said that the older browsers just don’t have the chops to do that.

Beginning August it will only support the current and prior major release of Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari on a rolling basis. Each time a new version is released, the company will begin supporting the update and stop supporting the third-oldest version.

However it is killing off support for the following browsers and their predecessors: Firefox 3.5, Internet Explorer 7, and Safari 3. If users try these browsers on the cloud they will have trouble using certain features in Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, Google Docs and Google Sites.

Google's Chrome browser has had rather a good year. According to bean counters at Net Applications the fledgling browser has 10 per cent of the market having made gains at the expense of Redmond's Internet Exploder.

The figures do have some good news for Microsoft. It seems that IE9, which embodies Microsoft's dream to build a cutting-edge browser, is showing signs of real adoption with usage that grew from 0.4 percent in November to 0.5 percent in December.

For months now, Chrome has been on the rise. It jumped from 9.3 percent in November statistics to 10 percent in December. Mozilla's Firefox, the second-place browser, stayed flat at about 22.8 percent, Apple's Safari rose from 5.6 percent to 5.9 percent, and Opera was flat at about 2.2 percent.

Chrome and Safari grew at the expense of IE, which dropped from 58.4 percent to 57.1 percent.

The autocomplete features in Safari, IE, Firefox, or Chrome are vulnerable to ID theft and other attacks.

Insecurity expert Jeremiah Grossman is expected to tell a Black Hat conference that the four major browsers have critical weaknesses that have yet to be addressed by their respective companies, and could expose users' passwords, e-mail addresses, and more to attackers.

Grossman will show off a proof-of-concept attack at next week's conference but said that he is only doing so because he could not get the four main software outfits involved to take his hack seriously. If you have autocomplete turned on in many browsers, you just have to begin typing a letter or two in one of the fields before they all fill in with your name and address, possibly your credit card number, and more.

Grossman says attackers can simply create a page with hidden form fields that use JavaScript to enter letters and numbers into each field until it finds one that's a hit, and the browser autocompletes it. All users have to do is load the page, and they likely wouldn't even be aware of what's happening.

The autocomplete exploit works in the two most recent versions of Safari (4 and 5), as well as IE 6 and 7. Firefox and Chrome aren't susceptible to this particular attack, though they were vulnerable to another one involving the autocomplete.

Grossman says that the two browsers can expose stored usernames and passwords for saved sites, making it possible for a cross-site scripting vulnerability to grab the info when a user logs into a Google account or Facebook, for example. He said that he would never have talked about this publicly if Apple had taken this seriously, when he sent a follow-up query.